Richard Serra - Literal

old ideology, which he exposes in speeches around the
world. As José Arcadio Buendía played the alchemist
in his laboratory, Chávez plays the revolutionary on TV.
(Yet, unlike José Arcadio Buendía, he was able to fi nd
gold: a black muddy gold, which translates into more
than 13 billion dollars yearly in oil revenues.)
Although today’s socialism has been a reiterating
idea of his almost ten year regime in the country, it became
the international slogan of his revolution on January
30, 2005, during a speech to the 5th World Social
Forum. There, he tried to distinguish the new century’s
socialism from 20th century socialism, claiming that
it was more pluralistic and less state-centered—or at
least that it was different from the Soviet Union’s state
socialism and Cuba’s communism. A year and a half
later, during the Linking Alternatives II Conference
in Vienna, Chávez vaguely defi ned this ideology as
“based on solidarity, on fraternity, on love, on justice,
on liberty, and on equality”. Presto, the scaffoldings
48 4 L ITERAL. LATIN AMERICAN VOICES • FALL, 2007
for an inconsistent system of government were built.
Everything in this new socialism is jargon. In a wordby-word
analysis of his defi nition we see that there is
nothing new about it:
1. Liberty, equality and fraternity: Although Chávez
doesn’t use the words in this order, it’s clear that he
refers to the 18th century’s French Revolution slogan.
The French motto has fascinated Venezuelan politicians
since the country’s independence from Spain.
The phrase has become a historical cliché, and thus
bears no real meaning in the speech.
2. Solidarity: The term alludes to Chávez’s Latin
American foreign policy. Since 2005 Venezuela has
promised about 5.5 billion dollars to socialist countries
around the region in donations, loans and bond purchases.
Solidarity isn’t a new strategy; Venezuela has
always been supportive to other countries, because
it has the privilege to be among the region’s richest
lands. In fact, it was among the few countries standing
at Argentina’s side in the 1982 Falklands War. Also,
in 1986 during the Sandinistas crisis, this country met
with Mexico, Colombia and Panama to prevent a war
between Nicaragua and El Salvador. Today that solidarity
sounds like cash: because Venezuelan riches reproduce
at a fast rate, Chávez is able to support every
leftist entrepreneur around the region; without realizing
that it isn’t his speech what seduces them, but the
sound Venezuelan money makes.
3. Love: The odd word choice of “love” is tacky and
has no real meaning. How are we supposed to interpret
such abstraction? It is evidence of Chávez’s assimilation
of the liberation theology, an early 1970s Catholic leftist
movement, which claimed poverty to be a “social sin”
and capitalism a transgression. Although Chávez never
points specifi cally to this movement, he has repeatedly
declared that Jesus Christ is “the greatest socialist in
history” and that his “Sermon on the Mount” is parallel
with leftist ideals in the same terms the liberation
theory’s priests have done it in the past. The idea of
a Christian and socialist “love” is another populist bureaucratese
which is useful to allure masses in Venezuela,
a country where more than 96 percent of the population
has been baptized. However, it’s in confl ict with
Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto—the left’s Bible, and
a source repeatedly quoted by the president—where
religion is called “the opium of the people”.
4. Justice: Social Justice has become the paramount
ideal of Chávez’s government in Venezuela. In
fact, his huge public funding of social initiatives is the
main cause for his popularity in the country and in the
rest of the region. Due to its strong oil revenues, the
Venezuelan state is able to promote social programs in
the country’s slums and shantytowns. But the Bolivarian
Revolution—the ideological name Chávez’s followers
give to his government—did not introduce the idea
of social justice; it’s at the very core of socialism—a